Realex takes ‘Fire’ regulated social payments technology out of beta

Realex Fire, a new regulated payment service from Realex, has just been taken out of beta. The service, which aims to make payments more social and mobile, operates like a bank account with its own sort code, BIC and IBAN for international payments.

Entrepreneur Colm Lyon founded Realex in 2000 and today the company employs around 200 people in Dublin, London and Paris.

“Finally, we get the first of our new regulated payment services out of beta – welcome to the Realex Fire personal account (was known as Carapay during development),” Lyon commented on social media site Facebook this afternoon.

Realex, which is regulated by the Central Bank, processes more than €20bn worth of payments for thousands of online and mobile businesses every year.

In order to be part of the transformation of payments to mobile and social channels, Realex decided to address fundamental problems in the payments business by joining the core of the banking system and becoming regulated.

With Realex Fire, the idea is to make accounts easier to access via any mobile or web device and via integrated interfaces (APIs).

“It operates like a bank account in that it has a sort code, account number, BIC and IBAN, and with limited features to date.

“The objective is to make payments more social, mobile, less expensive to process and more secure with less fraud. To achieve that we needed to be in the core of the banking networks so for years we have been building connectivity to different clearing systems at the back end. While we will release more features over the coming months, I’d be delighted with any feedback in the interim,” Lyon said.